Can you tell me how the table of numbers was generated? All it says is that it was "calculated" by ChatGPT. This guy is an econ professor; where's his reproducible methodology?
Further, he's treating this 2022 snapshot as a timeseries as if the various categories are tracking the same people over time. Just because 80 year olds in the data are wealthier than the younger brackets doesn't mean that those are the same people (in fact, those 80 year olds are boomers who grew up during a time of unprecedented financial growth and stability in the US, and who currently own a massive amount of housing in the US and are refusing to retire and allow younger people to take their high-paying jobs).
I can continue but those are the most egregious issues to begin with and I'm tired of reading this slop.
To put it more succinctly, I know engineers/lawyers/doctors in this country I’ve been living in that make 2k a month and it’s good. They work hard, it’s stressful. A fast food worker in the US can make $15/hr and bring in 2.4k a month.
Most don’t live like it and frankly the ones that show off typically are nowhere are wealthy as they’d like you to believe. Meanwhile the person driving an older model car and mowing their own grass has millions in the bank and doesn’t think twice about it.
Many are simply very wealthy but not materialistic.
Once you realize that 10% of households are getting $200k+/yr of unearned income and 1% of households are getting 1.3M+/yr of unearned income by virtue of owning lots of assets in an economic system geared to pump assets at the expense of literally everything else, it becomes very clear why the social contract experienced by the rest is undergoing rapid deterioration yet still has legions of influential staunch defenders that come out of the woodwork any time someone proposes even modestly pushing back on the worst of it.
Oops, did I say "unearned income"? Forgive me, I meant unrealized gains -- I didn't mean to imply that taxes were due on those massive passive flows of money. Perish the thought!
Is this chart based off personal or household net worth?
But people's perception of their own wealth depends way more on relative value of their wealth compared to cost of living. If you live in a city where some shitty 2 bedroom apartments cost 1m$+, you aren't going to feel all that rich even if you have 10 million dollar net worth.
In fact, that's sort of the problem: the massive "rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are" cash flows run away exponentially from the "poor people get paid for working" cash flows, inflating the price of any inelastic good beyond their reach. The economy stops being about work and starts being about wealth. Which might be fine if most people were wealthy enough to not work, but that's overwhelmingly not the case so it's overwhelmingly not fine.
Of course rational thing to do would be to take the money and move to a less expensive city, but with the same logic, anyone who has 1m net-worth could liquidate their assets, move to a different country, retire and live a proper wealthy lifestyle.
But we don't see that happening all that much at all. Mostly what happens is that people are choosing to live middle class lifestyles in most expensive areas that they can afford.
In my opinion, if the analysis is offloaded to the plagiarism machine, it loses all epistemological value.
Even things like fast food or Walmart are a testament to the abundance the US has
Supermarkets are pretty American, but that's not true for the same reason it might have been in Yeltsin's day. I think you'd have trouble making a serious argument that communities with Tesco are fundamentally poorer or worse off than those with Walmart.
American megastores with 60,000+ SKUs are just a cultural preference in North America, and not even a universal one at that. Costco is very successful both domestically and internationally by rejecting that model. Trader joes (Aldi) is extremely competitive in the US despite a blatantly European business model. Americans are far more excited for either one of those to move in than a Walmart.
Still wealthy either way but I always find it a bit jarring how skewed the US self perception is since people generally experience something closer to the median.
jackb4040•1h ago
tom_alexander•46m ago
The article has the author listed at the top. If you click on it, you'll see which university he works for. With his name and university, you can Google to find his wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Caplan
schmidtleonard•45m ago
"I got in early to the ponzi and life is good can't see what the ungrateful young'uns are whining about!"
ElProlactin•43m ago
The author's data says the median net worth for 65–74 year-old households is about $410,000, but 56% of it is home equity. Exclude the house and the median net worth drops to $171,000 and the median financial assets (the part that could actually be converted to cash easily) are only about $115,000. At the 25th percentile, wealth excluding home equity is under $30,000 for every age bracket from 55 up. So basically the net worth number looks best for the people whose wealth is least spendable.
That calls into question the author's claim that "given their current net wealth, a solid majority of Americans can comfortably retire without Social Security." Back of the envelope math: safely drawing 4% on $115,000–$170,000 provides just $5,000–$7,000 a year versus a median SS retirement benefit in the low $20,000s.
For a typical retiree, SS is worth more than every financial asset they own combined. The author says that downsizing or reverse mortgages count as "doing fine" but that's just his opinion. Reverse mortgages are expensive and you lose your equity quickly, and downsizing in the current market basically means that you pay way more for way less.
From what I can tell, it's basically the top third who could do without SS comfortably. Not at all a "solid majority."
rcpt•11m ago
Can you elaborate on that? It's pretty common for people to sell their 4 bedroom family house and retire to Florida. But it's not "way more for way less"
rcpt•13m ago